Notes: Yes, that down there is an angst story. XD I'd forgotten how theraputic writing angst was.

On an unrelated note, I throughly suck at titles.

Training Technique

Stab. Dodge. Kick.

Contrary to popular opinion, she wasn't instantly good at everything she tried. Once in a while being effortlessly good took effort. Namely, hours of going at the punching bags and straw dummies like they had done her great personal wrong.

They had faces, the punching bags. She could see them clearly in her head, and they were what kept her going at full power for literal hours. Simple straw dummies didn't deserve that kind of hurt. It was a classic example of projecting anxieties (and she knew it), but she preferred to think of it as a healthy outlet for frustrations. At least this way, people didn't get hurt.

She did not count those idiots who sneaked upon her in this state of mind among 'people', and anyway, it hadn't happened in a while. Camp Half-Blood was not usually populated by suicidal maniacs.

Crouch. Swing. Stab again.

She'd started doing this almost since she'd first come to Camp. Back then, the dummies looked had looked strangely like everything from Furies to Cyclopses to her Stepmother to Chiron in I-don't-care-how-bored-you-are-you're-still-not-going-out mode. Mostly though, they had looked like Thalia.

She told herself that it was not really rational, the way her imagination happily tacked the face of the girl she'd admired the most in the world to the dummy she was attempting to pulverize, but it didn't really have much of an effect. Quite the contrary, she was at her most violent when it was Thalia. She tended to slash with all her might, deliver bone-breaking kicks and had even clawed at the dummy sometimes.

She was smart enough to recognize why, once she'd started thinking about it. Monsters and other unimportant people trying to mess up her life was a given, and she sneered at anything trying to make her lose her cool that way. It hurt a hell lot more when someone you loved went ahead and let you down.

Lunge. Arced slash. Retreat.

Thalia had gotten herself killed. She'd went down in a mess of blood and monster slime, and was hated for it. Mostly for making her watch it from where she couldn't help. Because she could have done something, she could have helped somehow and god, that bitch should have at least let her stay and help.

Stab. Stab. Rip.

And then when she was twelve, she started seeing Luke.

It was something of a relief, really. By then, she was feeling guilty about all the rage she'd poured at the Thalia manikin- and maybe on the way to admitting that maybe it wasn't Thalia's fault after all. Luke's offense was so much nearer, so much simpler, and so much more easy to take offense at. Hating a traitor was also saner than hating the friend who'd walked into death just so you could live.

And for a while there, she even convinced herself that it was all about Luke turning against all of them and not caring about the possibility of destroying the whole world, and not about him turning his back on her.

It had all been so clean and simple and logical. Luke was a jerk and deserved to be castrated, and so she obliged her sadistic inner mauler to victimize him. She got trained he got injured in spirit. It was payback for the whole turing-into-an-evil-overlord thing.

Breathe. Slash. Retreat.

Then he'd tricked her into holding the Sky, which put her through a world of hurt so intense she couldn't really tell where the physical pain ended and the mental began. And then she'd hacked at the dummies with everything she could muster, because she still loved him despite it. The realization might have hurt worse; she couldn't really tell. Back then, all she could care about was how he kept breaking her heart, and she kept letting him.

After a while, she'd almost started to forget. She'd almost got over the fact that he existed and had almost designated him into the 'nameless Titan Commander' post. And then he'd gone and killed himself over a promise he made to her about a decade ago.

It had taken them months to replace the dummies she'd gone through in the span of a week.

Stab. Slash. Claw.

She stepped back, breathed in and reminded herself that this was practice for hidebound monsters and that clawing at them was not likely to have much effect.

It had been pretty bad, but she'd taken comfort in the fact that it was over, and had fervently wished never to go through anything of the sort again.

She'd assumed that the Fates pointed and laughed at her even as she'd thought it. But she hadn't expected this to happen a few measly months later.

Breathe. Stance. Tense.

It was happening again, and it was distressingly familiar. The person she cared about the most in the world was not with her anymore, and that made her furious. With the rest of the world too, but mostly with him.

Percy had no real excuse for upsetting her like this. He was freaking invincible, which meant he couldn't go and get himself killed without effort. His fatal flaw was loyalty, so he wasn't supposed to be susceptible to random tempters from the dark side. She was safe from any grief-mongering idiocy from his side, even if he made up for that in plain old idiocy.

But Percy being Percy had found an entirely new way to annoy her and had vanished without a trace. Just like that.

Attack. Attack. Attack.

Nobody knew where he was, Iris messages wouldn't reach him. All she'd got from Rachel was some vague comment about a shoe. She'd stubbornly avoided trying to contact Nico till he showed up and told her that no, there was no news from his side, so could she please stop trying to pretend that he didn't exist and try giving him something to do?

Like that was much comfort. Luke and Thalia hadn't been in the Underworld either. She thought it was all distressingly similar.

She'd lost Thalia to the Hunt. She'd lost Luke to Kronos. And now she was going to lose Percy-

Slash. Rip-

Annabeth Chase stabbed the dismembered figure one last time, dropped to the ground, and cried.